Bitcoin sometimes referred to as magic internet money.
It's currently the 15th largest currency in the world.
We feel that Bitcoin embodies a lot of the open source ethics such as open collaboration
and decentralization.
In the last two years, 2021 and 2022, two of my colleagues have also been here speaking
at FOSDEM.
So I'm very grateful to be here waving the Bitcoin design community flag.
Speaking of the Bitcoin design community, it is pretty young.
It's just two and a half years old.
The mission of the community is to improve the global adoption of Bitcoin.
And that's only possible if we all openly collaborate and work together.
The community basically acts as an online space.
When I say online space, I'm talking about a Slack channel, simple as that.
It's an online community.
There's a whole hub of different projects in that community.
There's even open source projects who just have their own Slack channel.
So they choose to be in that Slack channel and work totally out in the open.
They ask questions.
It's a hive of very busy, active projects all working synchronously and asynchronously.
I will share a little bit of stats about the community.
So we have just over 3,000 Slack members.
We have a couple thousand Twitter followers.
There's a lot of devs in this room.
So when I say close pull requests, you know exactly what I'm talking about.
We complete a lot of calls.
So as I say, a big goal of the community is to help other open source projects.
So we jump on calls with projects who would like to improve their user experience.
And we assist them.
So that's why there's that many calls.
As you can see, not all of the calls are recorded because we have 174 completed calls and 103
YouTube videos.
Then we have a newsletter and we work with basically, there's a lot of project collaborations
that we work with.
So we've worked with Stratum.
I don't know if some of you have heard of Bitcoin Core, as well as Wallet's Trutony
and Blixt.
Any of you heard of any of these projects?
Cool.
Bitcoin Core, nice.
So I'll share a little bit about my background.
Many many years ago, I worked as a marketing consultant.
And the reason I worked in marketing was I had a passion for business and strategy and
those kinds of things.
But the area in marketing that interested me the most was actually the research part.
And why it actually interested me is because I was always interested in figuring out why
things work the way they did.
I was always interested in getting down to the nitty-gritty truth about things.
And I have a feeling that there's a couple of people in this room that kind of share
that insight, just raise of hands.
Yeah, there's a natural researcher in a couple of us.
So I specialized as a marketing researcher.
And during that time, I pretty much worked as a consultant.
So I worked as a consultant for basically like small and medium-sized businesses, helping
them to devise strategies based on the research that I conducted.
How did I stumble upon UX design?
I was always fascinated with tech and I was losing the challenge in working as a marketing
consultant.
It was just the challenge that was missing.
So I decided just to go ahead, there's that accessibility.
Yeah, that would look cool.
No, no, it's good.
So I decided to start studying something else.
And I came across UX design.
And UX design for me was an intersection of three things that I was really passionate
about.
One was the intersection of design, psychology, and research all in one.
These were things that I already enjoyed and I was already doing.
So it was a perfect opportunity to combine all of them.
Then I stumbled upon the Bitcoin design community.
Here is a screenshot.
This was just taken last night.
So the community is basically, as I mentioned, it's this hub, it's very free, very open
communication, very relaxed.
And in the community, there are all these different projects that are working out in
the open.
They're all open source projects.
Bitcoin Core is one of them.
So I started basically volunteering at this community, as in jobless volunteering, you
know, because I was passionate about working in Bitcoin.
So I started volunteering, I was just having a whole bunch of fun, jumping on all these
different calls.
And then one day, someone came knocking at my door and said, hey, Mo, like, you know,
you're doing some pretty good work here in the community.
Why don't you, you know, be a UX researcher?
And I was like, like me, you know, there was like imposter syndrome came in from all sorts
of different directions.
I know everyone here has dealt one time with the post syndrome, but it came in from all
sorts of different directions.
The first challenge was the technical challenge, because particularly in the industry that
I work in, the technical know-how is extremely, it's extremely high because of all the terminology,
you know, I work in Bitcoin and I work in Lightning.
So there's a lot of what I would use the term gibberish, which now to me doesn't sound
like gibberish anymore, it makes sense.
So then I started to find some direction.
I met Christoph Onno, who works in the Bitcoin design community.
And he basically said, Mo, why don't you be an evangelist for UX research in the Bitcoin
design community?
Why don't you wave the research flag?
So I said, okay, you know, why not?
Let's give it a shot.
And he then basically suggested to me to create a UX research toolkit for the entire ecosystem
to use so that if they didn't have a UX researcher on their team, they could basically dive into
the toolkit, grab a tool that they felt would be useful and start using it.
And so I started building.
So my goal was to develop this UX research toolkit, which would basically help projects
in open source to feedback insights and data and knowledge back into their projects so
that they could develop more human centric products.
But of course, there were some challenges along the way.
There were two very big challenges that I faced.
Within the industry that I work in, UX research is still very much at its infancy.
So building the kit, a big part of my role is getting people to understand the benefits
of UX research.
So that was the first biggest challenge.
The second biggest challenge was no such toolkit actually existed.
So there are UX research toolkits on the market.
If you go into Figma community and you type in UX research, there are toolkits that exist
on the market for UX research, but not specifically for the industry that I worked in.
So there I was building this kit.
And if I look to the left, hey, can you help me with some advice?
There's no one there.
If I look to the right, there's also no one there.
So I started building this kit purely based on the projects that I was working with within
the community.
And so I needed to get very hands on.
It's nice to see that we have someone from Bitcoin Core here in the room, because one
of the projects that I work on is Bitcoin Core.
I've also worked with the Galois team, and I've also worked on the Blexed Wallet.
So what I actually did was I basically just wave my hands, sent out a Slack message to
these different people in the community.
And I said, hey, can I come jump in and can I come talk to you about UX research?
So I started jumping on these calls and working with these projects, I started to really get
a good feel of what do they need, what kind of insights do they need to be able to build
more human-centric products.
So I started to build the kit from a place of real hands on experience with different
projects.
But of course, I was working in a silo.
So this is showing the messiness of it.
First started designing different resources, different tools, working in Google documents.
There were files everywhere.
You know, I call it like, I don't even know what you call it, you're smiling, probably
you recognize this, there were files everywhere on different platforms.
And I was working in a silo, as I said, because while I had my feet in these projects, I still
was working alone as a UX researcher.
So the first iteration of the UX research toolkit, it was just like, hey, these are
all the different types of UX research tools and methods that are available.
Here they are, I'll design tools and resources for every single thing that's available.
So I went in with that, I would call it naivety.
And then something really interesting happened.
I started to really embody the ethos of working in public.
And I was just speaking with another UX researcher about that.
And the ethos of working in public is basically sharing all of your work out in the public
even when it's messy.
Yeah, you do the same, I guess.
So it's, you know, I don't, when I share my research or what I'm doing in my research,
I don't share the final presentation.
I share the messy parts.
I share the Google document with the UX research strategy that's half finished.
I'm still building the strategy.
Have a look everyone.
Do you have anything to contribute?
So this is what I started doing and as a result of sharing my work on Twitter, on LinkedIn,
and being very public, open, and transparent, people started reaching out to me.
Fellow UX researchers, they started reaching out and they started saying, hey, you're building
something, it looks interesting, could you tell us more about it?
So I started inviting them onto my calls and I actually invited them to build with me together.
And then we, so the picture here, the picture's not here.
I added in a picture, one of the slides, maybe it comes up later on, but there's a picture
of a whole bunch of us on the call together, but basically different UX researchers from
different industries, not only the industry that I work in, they started to jump on these
calls and we actually started to together brainstorm and ideate.
We were like, okay, there's a whole spectrum of UX research tools that are available, but
what in your experience has been the tools that I've worked the best for the projects
that you've worked on?
So we did it with pure democracy, pure voting.
We just jammed together and we voted, we voted on which tools we felt would be the best.
And that's how this toolkit, these tools were basically chosen.
Right now we're still building out this first half and actually a week, no, next week Tuesday
we have a meeting to discuss which will be the other half of the research toolkit because
version one's pretty much been decided on.
It's been split out into two halves.
So one half is scope and build out.
So this is if you have no product and you're looking to build from scratch and you want
to build the product from scratch, you have nothing.
You start from zero.
And the other part is shipping the product to market.
So you already have a product, but you need to iterate on the product because you've been
getting a lot of user feedback.
So in our opinion, and this is just guidance and advice, we would say, hey, these might
be the tools you can use if you already have a product.
And these might be the tools that you can use if you're starting out from a new product.
But these are not hard and fast rules.
You know, they're totally open to you and your team and the resources and the time
that you have available.
And of course, because we're researchers, we absolutely wouldn't do it right if we
didn't collect feedback.
So we ran a UX research test on our UX research tool kit.
That was super fun to tweet about.
We had so much fun with that.
And we got feedback about our kit.
So that was a lot of fun.
And so we iterated on the kit.
So what I'm busy doing at the moment now is we've collected all of the UX research and
the feedback from the kit, and we're now iterating on it and making changes.
Just learned a very quick one, Pivot.
Pivot and turn if you think that is better for the user experience.
So basically, I was developing this kit, working in the silo.
And as a result of realizing that the way I was delivering my product was not going
to be usable for the people I intended it to be used by, I literally did a 180 pivot
within a really short space of time.
And I did it in public.
I was like, hey, guys, no, this is not going to deliver the right user experience.
So I pivoted.
So the second thing is that building in silo, it's nice to build in silo if it suits your
personality type.
But if you build as a team and you invite the entire ecosystem to build with you, you
get the insights, the knowledge, and the intelligence of everyone else.
And you get to learn from everyone else as well.
And the last insight is UX research is as much about communication as it is data.
If we would like the developers and the UX designers to take the feedback from our research
on board, we need to learn how to communicate it in a good way and in a visual way.
One of the things that I do is when I feedback my UX research insights to the team, I tend
to not feedback solutions.
Then I place the trust and the intelligence in the hands of the team.
And I say to them, listen, guys, this is an insight from a user.
They said they don't understand what this button means.
And then I asked the developers and I asked the UX designers, how can we solve this problem?
So it invites a very open conversation for everyone to come up with a solution together
as opposed to one person coming up with a solution.
That's it for me.
If you can find me on Twitter, Mogesh and I do.
Are there any questions?
Shoot.
Thank you.
How do your research methods differ across user types, contributors, teaming, node operators,
contributors?
Could you repeat that, please?
How do your research methods differ across user types, like from node operators, contributors,
and end users?
Node operators, users?
End users?
Yeah.
And people contribute to the protocol.
Can you repeat the question?
Yeah, it's just, it's, it's.
Am I really quiet?
Okay.
So you know there's different personas that participate in a network.
There's people who might contribute to the network and like open a PR, and then there's
people who are end users and adopt the product, and then there's people who have to run the
client.
How do you use different research methods to get feedback from all the people?
Do you more referring to the fact that the user feedback is kind of spread across like
GitHub issues to Twitter?
Is that kind of the, the data is kind of spread across different sources?
That's probably about classifying your users into different groups based on their tasks
or your scenario.
This would be more referring to, and that's a slide there.
It would be jobs to be done.
So I'll speak about jobs to be done very briefly.
So Blockstream has kind of, you know, popped in the community every now and then.
We've also had some node management platforms also jumping in lightning node management
platforms, jumping into the platform is community as well.
And they're really moving towards trying to understand the jobs or the tasks that the
interface needs to be able to do to satisfy or make the particular user groups happy.
So how they start this process is phase one is who are the different personas that we're
designing for.
So you could do a persona exercise and identify these different personas by doing
ethnographic research, user interviews.
But you could also do a jobs to be done, which is basically jumping, having a rough idea
of who you think these user groups are, and then having a very umbrella like conversation
with them and asking them what they need from the interface.
Does that answer your question?
Yeah.
So great talk.
Really interesting.
So thank you for giving it.
So I'm not a designer, but I'm a social scientist.
And I really like this idea of toolkits because methodologically in the social
science we do oftentimes a lot of things that research focused designers do.
And so in my experience, when finding correct tools to do things, it's like within the
social science, it's like you got to read a book.
So I published a book 20 years ago and it's got some ideas in there.
I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about how you got this community
together to put together, decide what tools go into the toolkit.
How did you do that outreach?
And I know you spoke a little bit.
I'm like voting on various things, but I was wondering if you could just give a little
bit more detail.
Yeah, absolutely.
So as I mentioned, when I started creating and feel free to stop me when the time is
up, but as I mentioned, I basically, when I started, I started really umbrella and I
started just thinking, oh, I'll just start creating tools for every, all the different
UX research tools that I know about.
Basically, we at the community, we have calls.
The calls are all open for everyone to watch on YouTube.
Probably if you go on YouTube, you type in UX research calls, Bitcoin design community,
you'll find the call where we voted.
So we basically had four UX researchers, everyone from different backgrounds.
First, we opened up with a conversation of, hey, how do we split the toolkit?
What would be the most sensical way of splitting the toolkit?
That was the question number one.
Then we decided on the two areas.
And then question number two was, in your experience, what has worked the best with understanding
and gaining insights at this phase of the product?
What helps to understand and get insights at that phase of the product?
And then we just jammed.
Like everyone was, we wrote, we made a few sticky notes and then we voted literally with
smiley faces and we didn't even share, there were no names attached to smiley faces.
So it was really open and transparent.
And yeah, I mean, if there's any UX researchers in this room, I openly invite you.
And I know there's already one in this room.
I openly invite you to come work on the UX research toolkit because it's completely open for everyone.
I want more minds and more insights on it because I believe we can only build better products if we build together.
That's the selection.
Yeah, you can find me on Twitter.
If you reach out to me on Twitter, I'll direct you to the Slack channel and we can, yeah.
Thanks for the great presentation.
I'm really curious now that you're working on this research toolkit and you want to take it somewhere,
what is the next step?
How do you make sure that the people that you want to reach with it can actually start using it?
I already have an idea about that.
I love that question.
So my next dream, and I think I have to stop now and I'll wrap it up very quickly,
is that my next goal is once the toolkit's built out, I'm going to reach out to all the open source projects.
I'm going to go knocking at everyone's door and say, hey, can you come help me test out this toolkit?
Can we run it through?
Can we do a bit of a sprint in your project?
And then I'd like to get feedback from them and see how they experience it and then build case studies out of that feedback
and then show other projects like, hey, Bitcoin Core used the toolkit.
Look, this is how it worked for them.
This is the case study and then use that as a way to basically move forward.
Cool.
Thank you, everyone.